Hi listeners, Benjamin here. It is Wednesday evening just before midnight here in the UK,

and I set up much later than I would usually to watch the launch of NASA's Artemis 2 mission,

which blasted off about 21 minutes and 55 seconds ago from Kennedy Space Center in the US.

Now, this mission will take a crew of four around the moon and back, and there'll be a lot of

science being done along the way. Joining me to talk about all of that is Alex Wittsey, who covers all things space for

nature and who joins me from Colorado. Alex, hi. Hi, good evening, good night, good morning,

wherever you are. Well, we have been watching the launch together and say we're just into the

mission. It was a very tense time. For listeners who maybe were asleep at the time, where are we right now with the mission? What's going on? What's happened is we lifted off and the astronauts are on the way to going into Earth orbit. The plan is that they're going to stay in orbit around the Earth for about another 24 hours or so. They're not quite there yet at the time that we're speaking, but hopefully by the time this comes out, the astronauts will be going around the Earth, kind of checking out all their systems to make sure they can go on their way to the moon after that. And as I say, it was quite a tense watch for all of us. And it's been quite a journey getting to this point, right? I've been glued to weather reports, not just here on Earth, but of course,

weather reports from the sun as well over the past 24 hours. But the launch itself was a bit of a

sprint finish. They had a two-hour window and they hit it right at the start. It turned out to be a

really pretty flawless launch. I mean, all things considered. So this is really important because this is a big new

rocket that's flown only once before. It's never flown with humans on it. So there's four

souls on top of that giant flaming streak that's lifting up into the sky. So a lot is at risk here

and at play here for NASA. But when push came to shove, the preparations went smoothly. The rocket had been bedeviled

by leaks in its hydrogen and helium propellant lines and other sort of like liquid fuel problems.

And none of those happened today. So in the run down to the final launch, actually,

things went remarkably smoothly. And obviously the astronauts on board, they're still strapped in at the moment,

but they are going to be doing a lot science-wise, despite this really being essentially a round

trip, not least testing out the Orion capsule that they are ensconced in for the duration

of their mission. Yeah, so this is going to be a nearly 10-day mission, and there every single minute is jam-packed.

The goal of the mission, of course, is to make sure that the spacecraft they're in,

this thing called the Orion capsule, can in fact support humans traveling into deep space.

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